The authors of the U.S. Constitution were all too aware of the dangers of unchecked monarchs, many of whom plunged countries into ill-advised wars. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison said, “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”
While the president retains the role of commander in chief and the duty to execute wars, the framers gave Congress the powers to declare and fund war as a check on the executive branch.
For much of U.S. history, Congress upheld its end of the deal. However, following World War II, this balance shifted as presidents increased their foreign-policy power and the executive branch grew with the creation of the Defense Department, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency in 1947. During this postwar period, Congress rarely broke from the president on issues of foreign policy, given that there was not much daylight between the views of the president and the legislature.
The Vietnam War woke Congress out of its stupor when the United States was unexpectedly dragged into a prolonged and costly conflict without ever formally declaring war. In its wake, Congress reasserted itself with the War Powers Resolution (1973) and Arms Export Control Act (1976), which aimed to restrict the president’s ability to go to war and created oversight for exporting weapons. Yet in the decades that followed, these did little to prevent the United States from undertaking unauthorized military action around the world—in Grenada, Panama, Kosovo, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere.
Today, the United States now finds itself at a new equilibrium in which, as political scientist Sarah Burns wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2020, “executives prosecute wars unilaterally, Congress provides little more than a fig-leaf of authorization (if any at all), and the courts rarely interfere.”
When Congress does authorize military action, it often does not repeal or sunset the legislation, allowing presidents to exploit it indefinitely. The executive branch is still using authorizations granted more than 20 years ago, including the 2001 authorization for the use of military force that gave the president permission to use force against al Qaeda after 9/11 and the 2002 authorization that allowed the Iraq War.
This is a far cry from what the Founders envisioned. As constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin put it in 1958, “The Constitution … is an invitation [to the president and Congress] to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.” But in this game of tug-of-war, Congress has, more often than not, let go of the rope.
Some observers may attribute Congress’s hesitancy to struggle with the president as a reflection of political realities. Many members simply may not want to make difficult votes that have little upside. With the Iraq War, for instance, many who voted to authorize the war were later pilloried for doing so.
American University political science professor Jordan Tama offers a less cynical view: Most members simply lack deeply held views on foreign policy. Many were local attorneys, teachers, and small-business owners before joining politics. They’ve spent their careers working on issues affecting the people in places such as Scottscale, Arizona, and Youngstown, Ohio, not Sudan or Yemen. Because most members do not sit on the intelligence or national security committees, it’s harder for them to get up to speed on these issues, and unless a war is front-page news, most find it difficult to justify prioritizing meetings and briefings that don’t directly impact their communities.
Critics have often argued that Congress’s involvement in foreign-policy issues slows down the policymaking process, as was evident with the long-delayed security supplemental legislation for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed earlier this year. The road to passing this aid package was stymied by months of political gamesmanship and delay, during which Russia made major battlefield gains over Ukraine.
Ultimately, however, Congress did provide funding for Ukraine. And the process, though long and contentious, forced Washington to make the positive case to the American people for why it should spend billions of their dollars on wars in places that most have never been to nor ever will. Given that the legislative branch answers to more frequent elections and hears directly from constituents, its involvement should be considered a vital part of the public policy process, not a hindrance to it.
Others may think that Congress is too polarized, and that such a partisan body should not be allowed to politicize and get in the way of foreign policymaking. Democrats and Republicans, respectively, would likely argue that this happened with detrimental effect during the Benghazi hearings under former President Barack Obama and the Russia investigation under former President Donald Trump.
But Congress is actually quite bipartisan when it comes to foreign policymaking, even more so than on domestic issues. During the 2010s, a majority of Senate Democrats and Republicans voted together on foreign-policy issues 54 percent of the time versus only 38 percent of the time on domestic ones. Despite their differences, Republicans and Democrats eventually came together to pass the security supplemental this spring.
That being said, there is still a long way to go if Congress wants to live up to its constitutional potential. Perhaps the best place to focus its efforts is reeling in the president’s ability to unilaterally conduct military strikes abroad without congressional approval. For example, although a few members expressed concerns, Congress took no concrete action in response to the Biden administration’s strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in January of this year. While President Joe Biden likely would have received support for authorization of these strikes, he notified Congress only after they took place instead of allowing Congress to debate the merits of the action and vote on whether or not to allow U.S. troops to engage in hostilities.
Members of Congress should be allowed the time to consider U.S. military action before it is taken, because once underway, it can be difficult to stop. In his own correspondence, former U.S. President George Washington made this abundantly clear: “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore, no offensive expedition … can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated … and authorized such a measure.”
Simply put, if Biden had time to garner a coalition of countries to join U.S. attacks against the Houthis, he had the time to come to Capitol Hill to make the case.
Given the danger of engaging in ill-advised conflicts, Congress should make it a priority to repeal the outdated authorizations still in use and ensure that any new authorizations include sunset provisions. If there are new reasons to conduct military operations in these regions, the president should make that case directly to Congress and the American people before entering into potentially decadeslong and trillion-dollar conflicts. Doing so will not prevent the president from acting quickly and unilaterally if the United States or its troops are under attack; it will simply slow down wars of choice, putting a check on conflicts that are not in the country’s immediate self-defense.
Currently, one of Congress’s biggest foreign-policy showings each year is passing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which sets the budget and policy priorities for the Defense Department. But Congress should also make it a habit of passing annual authorization bills for all foreign-policy-related departments—including the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Development Finance Corporation—instead of leaving it to only the appropriations committees to fund their agencies. Specifically, the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees should take the lead and routinely pass these authorizing bills each year, just as the Armed Services committees do for the NDAA. If the Armed Services committees can pass the NDAA 64 years in a row, so too can the committees that oversee our diplomats.
Finally, congressional leadership should broaden access to top clearances and sensitive compartmented information clearances for congressional staff who meet the requirements. Currently, only staff members in leadership and on committees are allowed to receive this clearance and join the most sensitive national security briefings on topics such as Ukraine, Gaza, and China, while staff in members’ offices can only be cleared at the top-secret level. Expanding access will help members who are not experts on foreign-policy issues or lack a strong interest better take part in important foreign-policy decisions.
In recent years, Congress has shown that it is capable of exercising its powers to shape U.S. foreign policy and place checks on the executive branch.
During the Trump administration, in 2017, Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which required congressional review before the president can lift sanctions on Russia and certain other nations. In 2018, Congress rejected Trump’s proposal to cut the U.S. State Department and USAID budgets by a third. One effort that I personally had a role in, serving at the time as the national security advisor to Rep. Ro Khanna, was helping to pass the Yemen war powers resolution in 2019, which directed the president to end U.S. participation in the Yemeni civil war. Although Trump vetoed the resolution, his administration ultimately adopted the legislation’s aim and stopped refueling the jets bombing civilians in Yemen because of pressure from Congress.
This momentum has continued into the Biden administration. In 2021, Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Act, which prevents U.S. companies from using any products from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. Just last year, the House of Representatives created new national security committees and commissions to address areas it felt were important, including the Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party in 2023 and the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology in 2022. And in anticipation of Trump’s potential return to the White House, Congress passed legislation in 2023 to prevent any president from withdrawing from NATO without consent from Congress.
Congress has shown that it knows how to play this game of tug-of-war and meaningfully shape U.S. foreign policy. Now, as it embarks on its final stretch before the November elections, it must act to ensure that Washington’s foreign-policy decisions reflect the broader will of the U.S. people and can be vigorously debated in the halls of Congress, as well as in our towns and cities.
Regardless of who becomes the next president, Congress must reclaim its role in issues of war and peace so that all Americans have a hand on the rope.
The post How Congress Can Reclaim Its Role in U.S. Foreign Policy appeared first on Foreign Policy.
